SCIENCE FICTION BOOK REVIEW: "Timequake" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1997)

I’ve resisted reading this book for a long time. I’m not entirely sure why.

I first became aware of Kurt Vonnegut, by extension anyway, in 1977 or 1978. Star Wars was out, it was insanely popular, and as an aftermarket bonus, Science Fiction in general was insanely popular. As it was easier to produce books about SF than to actually write it, a whole slew of lavishly-illustrated books with titles like ‘The Road to Science Fiction’ and ‘Science Fiction Film History’ and ‘Speculative Cinematic Fiction’ and so on, all of which were pretty much just collections of stills from various movies, with just enough text to pad out the book to 100 pages. As SF was ‘kids stuff’ in those days, well-meaning parents with vague memories of Flash Gordon and Rocky Jones: Space Ranger simply bought these books for their kids without perusing them first. After all, SF is, what again? Monster movies and guys with swords and helmets that look like art deco gas pumps? Nothing bad there.

My parents, of course, did look at the books first, so I never got any. But at the Christian School I went to, my friends and I were scandalized by, but inexplicably compelled to look at pictures from A Clockwork Orange and Slaughterhouse Five, among others. This was undoubtedly my first exposure, third-hand though it was, to Vonnegut – sneaking peeks at nekked pictures of the beautiful Valerie Perrine in the lame movie version of Slaughterhouse.

None of us had any idea what the movie was about. Certainly the text never made it clear. The text never adequately explained what any of the movies were about, really, not in any of the books. My best friend at the time, said that it would probably make sense if you saw the movie. Yeah, but I’d seen Strangelove already, and it made no sense to me.

But I digress…

We all assumed based on our scant and incoherent knowledge of such things, we all assumed that Slaughterhouse Five must be a bad movie, undoubtedly based on a bad book by a bad author who was, undoubtedly a very bad man. Putting naked beautiful women in movies, why, who would do such a thing? The scandal to my virgin eyes! Yikes.

I remember Kurt’s name coming up from time to time, with no particular context aside from the vague unfavorable opinion of him. As a freshman in high school, I read “Harrison Bergeron” as homework during Gym, desperately trying to appear busy in the bleachers so as to avoid playing basketball. The gym coach, like all gym coaches, was a brutal little man with many issues, of which kids who read Vonnegut in the stands was just one. I got slammed square in the face with a basketball and ended up having to have two teeth filed down. I have many negative early associations with Kurt. For instance, I remember reading a magazine essay in which he babbled about how New York City was “Skyscraper National Park” in the waiting room of my dermatologist just prior to a particularly grueling session of leaching.

In fact, I never heard anyone say anything good about the guy until Kevin Bacon said “Slaughterhouse Five is a great book!” in the movie “Footloose,” for Pete’s sake.

Curiously, I made it more than